PVP 101
To give this guide a bit of structure it will be divided into several sections. For people who are unfamiliar with building a PVP viable monster concept from scratch, or players who are still inexperienced and confused about all the stats that define a monster, I strongly recommend reading through all of these sections. A little overview of the different sections: 1. The basics - what do all those stats mean and do? 2. Where to start - defining the role of your monster 3. Picking the right Nature 4. Understanding abilities 5. Picking a Moveset Alright then, let's start with the explanation of terms you will read throughout this guide! 1. The basics - what do all those stats mean and do? There are quite a few numbers you encounter when looking at the dex page of a monster. All of them influence how your monster performs and decide whether it can develop into a good PvP Monster or still on the bench, a pvp dud. Base-stats The numbers you will see to the right of the monster picture when looking at the monsterdex are called base-stats. Every monster of the same kind will have identical Base stats that will tell you what the monster is good at in general. A high value in attack means that physical attacks performed by the monster will hit hard, while a high speed value will tell you will hit first in combat versus slower monsters. These base-stats are later modified by nature, UV, TP and eventually abilities. Natures A nature will modify the base-stats of a monster by a certain percentage. To find the effects of a nature on a monster you’ve caught, look at its ‘Monster Details’ page and hover over the question mark next to the name of the nature. Maximum increase or decrease in one single stat is 60%. Out of all the possible modifiers to stats, natures have the highest impact. UVs - Unique Values UVs will simply add to the base-stats of the monster, each individual point in a certain UV will increase the corresponding base-stat by 1. Highest value can be 50 and the lowest can be 0. To get the full bonus a UV provides your monster needs to reach its maximum level which is 100. TPs - Training Points TPs are gained either by fighting wild monsters and NPCs, or by using a Nutrition that can be bought in the shop. The maximum of TP a monster can have in total is 799, and every 4 TP will add 1 point to the corresponding stat. For example, 40 TPs in attack would raise the total attack by 10 stats points. The maximum of TP that can be assigned to any single stat is 400, meaning a 100 point boost to that stat. TPs can be used to either further enhance the strengths of your monster (which makes the most sense in almost all cases) or balance out its weaknesses. Weaknesses and Resistances, to elemental types Beneath the picture and the base-stats of a monster, you can see a little chart showing type weaknesses and resistances of a monster when looking at the monsterdex. These determine how much damage you will take from certain elemental types. Most of these are quite logical, and you will get used to them after a while. If you see 0% in a certain element means the monster is immune to it - it does not take damage from those types. If it has neither a weakness nor a resistance, it will take 100% damage. If the monster is very vulnerable to a certain type, it can suffer from 200% up to 400% of the original damage of the opponents attack! Abilities Every monster gets assigned 3 random abilities out of a pool that can be seen at the bottom of the monsterdex page when you catch it. Abilities often further enhance certain base-stats or effect other beneficial things that can make or break a good monster. 2. Where to start - defining the role of your monster If you’ve read this far into the guide, you now know there are many factors we have to take into consideration when building a PVP viable monster. The whole process of choosing and planning out what monster to look for, what natures and abilities would benefit it and finding a suiting moveset will take quite some time at first. After you gain more experience, it will start to come naturally and you will get a better understanding of what works best. Now let's talk about where to start with the whole thought process - defining the role of your monster! PvP monsters can be categorized as one of the following in most cases: Glass Cannon Also referred to as a Sweeper, the purpose of this PVP monster build is to hit its enemy first and hit it hard. It is an all-out offensive monster with little to no defense. The idea behind this build is to Maim or KO the opponent before they have an opportunity to hit you back, with the ultimate goal of 1-hit killing the opposing monster in the first round of combat. The most famous natures in this category are Trembling (boosting speed and attack) as well as Hallucination (boosting speed and special attack), since they offer the highest possible boost for each speed and the corresponding offensive stat. Wall A Wall is the exact opposite of Glass Cannon. It is designed to survive and outlast opponents through the means of high health points, defensive stats and healing and/or status moves. While some walls are designed just to debuff opponents (lowering their stats) without actual killing potential, most walls come with moves that can inflict status effects, including bleeding, poison and burn, that can kill an opponent slowly. Since these status effects will always do percent damage, it doesn't matter that walls lack good offensive stats in that case, they will still be a threat. Popular Wall natures are Blockhead, Debonair or Discreet among a few others, boosting defensive stats at the cost of decreasing the offensive ones. A more detailed guide on PVP wall building can be found here. Mixed This, also referred to as a Stack Sweeper, is a build of monsters that is neither a pure sweeper, nor a pure wall, but somewhere in between. It has some defensive capabilities, but still able to dish out damage. These monsters often use moves to increase their stats before they try to inflict damage since they lack the sheer offensive power to sweeper, where others try to increase their defense or evasion through moves, while still having offensive capabilities. Mixed monsters can come in a lot of different PVP designs and they make for some very interesting specialised PvP monsters if they’re built correctly. Mixed natures can range anywhere from the more offensive oriented natures Mirage, Verve, Quantum, Mystic to more defense oriented natures Sedate, and Delicate. Now that we have covered the most common roles seen in PvP, the point where you have to think for yourself has come. What type of monster suits my style best? How do i want to compose my team? These questions will only be answered through experience, so get out there and PVP! Once you have decided what type of monster you want to build, it is time to move on to of the more creative aspects of MonsterMMORPG, building your PVP Monster. 3. Picking the right Nature I've categorized the natures you can almost never go wrong with as A natures, while more specialized natures that might not always cover all general needs for a role are under the B natures. Tier A: ( Attack / Defense / Special Attack / Special Defense / Speed / HP) Blockhead: -6 / +6 / -6 / +6 / 0 / 0 Debonair: -4 / +3 / -4 / +3 / -2 / +4 Discreet: -3 / +3 / -3 / +3 / -4 / +4 Endurable: -2 / +3 / -4 / +3 / -3 / +3 Mirage: +4 / +1 / -6 / +1 / 0 / 0 Verve: +5 / -1 / -6 / +3 / -2 / +1 Momentum: +4 / +4 / -4 / -4 / 0 / 0 Trembling: +6 / -6 / -6 / -6 / +6 / +6 Wail: -6 / +3 / +5 / -1 / +1 / -2 Mystic: -4 / +4 / +4 / - 4 / 0 / 0 Quantum: -4 / -4 / +4 / +4 / 0 / 0 Hallucination: -6 / -6 / +6 / -6 / +6 / +6 Tier B: ( Attack / Defense / Special Attack / Special Defense / Speed / HP) Delicate: -2 / +2 / -1 / +2 / -2 / +1 Guarded: -2 / +3 / -3 / +3 / -1 / 0 Sedate: -1 / +2 / -3 / +2 / -2 / +2 Sentinel: -2 / +2 / -2 / +2 / 0 / 0 Wise: -3 / +3 / -3 / +3 / -3 / +3 Now I know that looks like a lot of craziness, but the reason I listed them like that is so that you have a list of good natures, with their Stat effects, all in one place. A good Nature is probably the single biggest thing a PVP monster build needs. if a monster has a bad nature it’s only real use in game is a points for rank. Because natures are so important I’d like to talk about the process of choosing the right nature to go with the right monster. I think the easiest way to do this, right at first, will be to show you an example. Lets build a monster! First let’s identify which monster we want to hunt. I like a monster with strong defensive stats and high attack, so I looked through the Monster Dex and found this guy. http://www.monstermmorpg.com/Mantice-Monster-Dex-76 Beautiful huh? Now the first step in choosing a good nature for this Monster is to look at the base stats. In looking at this Matice, I can see that it has low a very low (for the tier) Special attack base stat when compared to some of its other stats. Because we know that it’s strength isn’t a Sp Attack nature we can weed out any natures that enhance Special Attack. Looking at its strong points we can see that Mantice has high base stats for Defense, Attack, Special Defense and Hp, which mean we can choose any nature that enhances any one of those stats. So at this point you can’t go wrong with a lot of different natures and you can feel free to hunt this monster with any of those natures in mind which will give you a better chance to find a good one. (If this is good enough for you, you can skip to the next section) Just to take it a step further lets narrow down our acceptable Nature list for this Monster. I like a monster that can defend both Physical and Special attacks, and its Def and Sp Def base stats are equally high so I’m now going to weed out any natures that degrade either Defense or Special Defense. I’d also like to take advantage of Mantice’s high base attack stat, so I’m going to weed out any natures that degrade Attack. So after all of those variables weeded out all of those natures that didn’t accomplish what I wanted, the nature I’m left with as the ideal Nature for my Mantice is, Mirage. It increases my attack stat 40%, raises my Defense and Special Defense 10% each, and it doesn’t touch my Hp at all which is great considering the other advantages. If you have been trying to guess the nature I picked, than good for you. You can see that picking a nature for your monster may seem like a daunting task at first, but once you gain more experience, you’ll be doing this stuff in your sleep. Just remember, the steps to picking the right nature are: 1. Look at the Base Stats 2. Decide What you do or don’t want it to do for your pvp team. 3. Look at the natures and weed out the ones that don’t work for your decided monster build until you narrow it down to one. 4. Understanding Abilities Abilities, though not as important as nature to a PVP monster, are a variable that can make or break your PVP monster build. There’s no reason for me to write out all the abilities and their definitions in this guide as you can just *click here* to pull up the Abilities list, but what i will do for you is outline some common PVP builds and clue you in on which natures could make or break that monster build. Hopefully, this will give you an idea of what you need to look for and look out for as you hunt your monsters. For our common PVP Monster build lets discuss a Stack Sweeper with a Mirage Nature (like we talked about with Mantic before). Just like natures, we want to look at the base stats of the monster, look at what we want it to do and then decide which abilities would enhance or debilitate our Monster. For our Mirage monster we’ll want something that will enhance or preserve it’s strengths (Attack, Defense and Sp Def stats), increase or preserve it health or make it more PVP viable. Some examples of abilities that would accomplish these things for us are: Attack Master - Increases the Monsters Attack stat 30% (increase stats) Maximum Guard - Prevents enemy monsters from lowers any of the monsters stats (preserve stats) Expert Regeneration - Monster recovers 15% health after every turn (increase) Perfect Body - Prevents enemy monsters from inflicting status’ on the Monster (preserves) Accuracy Master - Increases Monsters accuracy stat 30% Accelerator - User gain’s 1 stage of speed (10% speed) at the end of every turn Of course these are just 12 examples out of the total abilities, but the point is that you want to make sure that the ability enhances what the monster is already strong at or covers up a PVP monster builds weakness. For example it would be silly to have the ability ‘Special Attack Master’ on a Mirage Monster because it would use Physical attacks. It should be noted before we move on that when hunting, you will see 3 random abilities on every monster you encounter, even if it’s the same monster. For a complete list of abilities and their definitions click here* 5. Picking a Moveset Picking a moveset is the most creative thing you can do in MonsterMMORPG. You have four Move-slots to choose the best moves out of a Monsters move pool and you have to somehow make them all work together. Explaining the intricacies of making an amazing PVP moveset would be a little too much for ‘PVP Monster Building 101’, so instead of confusing you to the point of a rahe quit, we’re going to stick to the basics for now. When picking a moveset, the most obvious constraint on your choices will be the PVP monster your building’s move pool. Found under the monsters Elemental Type sensitivity chart on it’s Monster Dex page, the move pool will be your source of information as to what moves your monster is able to learn or be taught. The first thing to understand when constructing a moveset is the monsters Nature, Abilities, Type(s) and team role. Just as we did with the two previous sections, let’s bring back our Mirage Mantice. http://www.monstermmorpg.com/Mantice-Monster-Dex-76 Let assume for clarities sake that the abilities on our Mirage Mantice are the same as on its Monster dex page. They are... Beyond Type - Enables the Monster to hit immune enemies with 1x damage. Sleep Master - 15% chance to make the enemy Fall Asleep when damaging moves are used. Effect Expert - Increases status-category moves' priority by 1. The only ability out of the three that would have an effect on what moves we might pick is Effect Expert. Because of it, we know that we can use a status move before the enemy monster makes its move as long as it doesn’t also use a priority move (not common) and is faster. The other and most important variable we need to consider is the monsters nature. For our example we’re using a Mirage Monster, which degrades its Special Attack stat 60% and enhances its Attack Stat 40%. Understanding we need to plan the moveset to compliment our monsters strengths, we know that we have to limit our offensive move choices to Physical Moves. We also want to make sure we get 1-2 Physical Moves that are the same type(s) of our mantic, because our Monster gets a .5 boost from same type moves. So we need to look for Ice and Bug Physical attack moves. Now that we know we have priority on Status moves (1000 acc moves), we know we need two s.t.a.b. (same type attack bonus) moves and we now we have to pick Physical moves lets pick a moveset. As an example I’ve picked the following moves and will explain why I’ve picked them and how they work together to make this Mirage Mantice a viable PVP monster. The moves I’ve chosen are... Opportunism - This status move increases my Mantices Evasion 3 stages (30%) and because I have priority from the ability Effect Expert, I can increase my evasion before the enemy monster can try to hit me (because of this the enemy would probably miss). Colony Attack - This is a bug type S.T.A.B. physical attack move with 73 accuracy and 145 base power. Nothing more than a good hard hitting move. Ice Blast - This ice type S.T.A.B. physical attack move has ok accuracy at 71 acc and a decent base power of 85, but the reason I choose it is because it lowers the enemy Defense 30% every time it hit, leaving it susceptible to my Mantice 1 hit KOing it or just hitting it harder. Aura Heal - This is a Status move that allows me to heal 54% of my Health Points. Again because of Effect Expert my Mantice will have priority when using this move, meaning I can heal before the opposing monster hits me. Very useful. So the idea with this move set is to raise my evasion at least 30%, heal 54% HP if I need to and hit hard with two S.T.A.B. moves. This is a very strong move-set and makes our Mirage Mantice immediately PVP viable. If you still don’t completely get how to plan and make a move set don’t worry. It can sometimes take awhile to gain the experience needed to completely understand what you’re doing. Just remember the steps taken above and you’ll be fine. Well, that all for PVP 101! If you still are a little confused thats ok. It’s a lot of information to absorb, so just keep at it and you’re PVP Monster building skills will improve as your learn the game and gain experience. Good luck Monster Trainer!